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How many words do the Eskimo have for snow, anyway? Estimates range from as many as 400 to as few as 2, and ‘experts ’ have gone on record with varied counts of 200, 100, 48, 9, and 4. The snow issue, along with related questions about the number of words Arabs have for camels, or how many words the...
| Main Authors: | , , , |
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| Format: | Text |
| Language: | English |
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| Online Access: | http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.359.7120 http://www.cogsci.ucsd.edu/~coulson/Papers/katz-review.pdf |
| Summary: | How many words do the Eskimo have for snow, anyway? Estimates range from as many as 400 to as few as 2, and ‘experts ’ have gone on record with varied counts of 200, 100, 48, 9, and 4. The snow issue, along with related questions about the number of words Arabs have for camels, or how many words the Hanunoo have for rice, have historically fueled debate on the Whorfian hypothesis about linguistic determinism. The idea that language has a profound effect on our perception of the world has long fascinated students of linguistics and, indeed, anyone with an interest in language. However, throughout much of the 1960s and 19’70s perhaps because these squabbles about vocabulary had sometimes been motivated more by ethnocentric ignorance than by scholarship, serious debate about the Whorfian hypothesis seemed to have gone out of fashion. Enter George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in 1980 with the observation that everyday language is replete with metaphors, and the claim that metaphors offer the linguist a window into the mind. On this view, metaphoric language reflects |
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